Where the World Ends

by Geraldine McCaughrean

John was so grateful that she pumped his hand fiercely for fully a minute, and wept like a – well – like a girl.

  Quilliam was so grateful to Murdo for having told him about the monthly-mysteries-of-women, that he naturally went straight to find his friend and told him that John was, in fact, a girl. “You’re to tell no one, ever, y’hear? No one. I promised.”

  “Who would I tell?” Murdo said and shrugged. But a peculiar look came over him that Quill could only interpret as a flicker of hope.

  “Minister” Cane decided next that everyone must confess their sins to him once a week. Somehow, without it ever being discussed, Cane had retired from fowling to become a full-time priest.

  The idea must have come to him suddenly, and pleased him so much that he did not even wait for evening prayers to announce it, but sent Euan to seek out every boy and tell them the time of day and day of the week to report, in pairs, for their appointed Confession. Just maybe it was also Cane’s way of bypassing Mr Don and Mr Farriss. Had he announced his plan to everyone at supper, the men’s laughter or roars of protest might have damaged the “Minister’s” air of holiness. Cane firmly believed in his air of holiness. He had taken to holding the front of his jacket as he had seen Reverend Buchan hold the lapels of his coat. If he was going to be a minister of the kirk, he definitely needed both hands free to hold his lapels and look grand. Hence the need to give up fowling.

  Domhnall Don quite swelled up with rage when he finally heard about the summons to Confession. His jowls turned purple, and he threw down the bird he was plucking. “By the soul, are we Catholics now? Only foreigners and Catholics ‘confess their sins’. What, is he the Pope? And will someone tell me: does he have the power to forgive sins now?” Mr Farriss, too, filled up with disgust, the small blood vessels showing blue in his temples – but he said nothing. Like an oyster, that swallows sharp grit then shuts its lips tight, Farriss rarely put his feelings into words. Anyway, he and Don had rather surrendered responsibility for the boys’ souls to Col Cane (simply because neither of them felt equal to it). So perhaps they were partly to blame for the man puffing himself up. Still, if Cane thought Don and Farriss were going to “confess their sins” to him, he could think again.

  The cave that evening was full of boys trying to think of something to confess. When their eyes turned to Quill for a suggestion, he put up his two hands defensively. “Dunna ask me. How should I know?”

  He seemed to have been given some fearful new role to play: “the one blessed with Good Ideas” – and he could not quite think why. Was this what it was to be King Gannet? No, that was just about being good at climbing. Quill could not remember being anything but run-of-the-mill ordinary, back on Hirta. And yet…and yet, looking back to his boyhood, he could remember older boys seeming different – more trustworthy – more something… Could it be that a boy reached an age when he had to start being someone different – someone people could apply to for help, for answers? The thought petrified him.

  But when John crept over and asked him, “Quill, must I tell the Minister about me being…you know…?” he shook his head so emphatically that Kenneth, even through the smoke of the cooking fire, scented a secret and roused himself like a dog scenting meat.

  Kenneth, of course, had plenty of sins he could confess to – ought to confess to. By rights, Kenneth ought to say sorry for being born, but it is a strange kind of bully who lies awake nights fretting about his crimes. So it was startling when he got up during the evening meal, in front of everyone, and said to Col Cane, cold as sea-glass, “What we should do is tell you what other boys have done bad.” The mischief was shining so bright in Kenneth’s eye: Cane could surely read the villainy in him.

  But “Yes!” said the “Minister”, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice. “Yes! That shall be the way of it, Kenneth. Good lad. Each boy may either confess his own faults, or tell me the sins of another boy. Then all shall be known.”

  Was Kenneth mad? Surely everyone would use their Confession to tell how Kenneth had sworn at them, how Kenneth had punched them, how Kenneth had tripped them or twisted their arm or smashed the eggs they were carrying… Though no. A moment’s thought said that that would never happen. Of course it wouldn’t. No one tells tales on a bully, for fear the bully makes him pay afterwards.

  Kenneth looked around the cave with a smug leer. His eye rested a while on every boy in turn, and the look on his face asked: What shall I tell him about you?

  “You’ll not tell about John’s…secret, will you?” Quill whispered to Murdo. He knew the idea was in Murdo’s head because, just for an instant, he had wondered about telling it himself.

  “Why would I? It’s no a sin to be a girl.” And Murdo managed to be outraged at the suggestion (for all he had given it a thought). “We shouldna tell the man spit. No business of his what anyone’s done.” And his hands made fists and punched the air. Lately, there was a frenzy in Murdo that scared Quill. It is an awful thing when a friend alters from how you like them to be. Quill laid a calming hand on him, but Murdo threw it off as if Quill might steal some of the anger out of him, when he needed it all for himself.

  “Tell you what: let’s say what we havena done,” Quill suggested. “Not prayed enough. Not worked hard enough. Forgot our sums. Despairing’s a sin. We could confess to Despair.”

  “I havena despaired,” Murdo snapped.

  “I know it. I was only saying…”

  And Murdo did agree it was the best way to go: to confess to their “did nots” instead of their “dids”. So, attending Confession at the duly appointed time, kneeling in front of the so-called “Minister”, they owned up to sins of omission:

  “I didna pray before I slept last night.”

  “I’ve forgot the Ten Commandments.”

  “I didna spread the ash on the floor when Mam asked it.”

  “I fell asleep in the kirk while the Reverend Buchan was speaking.”

  “I think I despaired last Thursday. Just for a minute. Mighta been Friday.”

  “And what can you tell me of the sins of others?”

  “Nothing, Mr Cane.”

  “Minister Cane,” said the village gravedigger.

  But Quill had made John a promise. He had also made himself a promise – that he would never address Col Cane as “Minister”. “Nothing, Mr Cane,” he repeated, and Cane fetched him a blow with the back of his hand.

  Quilliam told no one about Mr Cane hitting him, but someone must have done, because suddenly the boys were terrified. Like Murdo and Quill, they had joked about what they would confess to, or who they would accuse, and say, He picked his teeth. He snored in my ear. Now, they were threatened with violence. There was no more laughter.

  St Kildans are gentle people – Quill knew that because Murdina had said as much: Such lovely, gentle people, you are: happy as robins perched on your little island kingdom, she had said.

  “If Cane hits me, I’ll kill him!” Lachlan burst out.

  The others stared at him, his face puce with rage, his teeth bared like a dog. “Not here. Not here. Not here, he willna! Not nobody willna! Not here!” And he glared around at the other boys, as if he had thought of the Stac as his safe haven only to find it threatened by a man with fists.

  Days of the week seemed important, and not just for the sake of knowing when Sunday came round yet again or the right day for Confession. How was a Thursday different from a Tuesday? The boys ate the same, did the same work, thought the same thoughts. And yet they were forever asking: “What day is it, Quill?” “Is it Friday, Quill?” “Is it Monday?” The days of the week are like when you are going down a cliff, feeling about with one foot and needing to find the next foothold. If they’re not there when you feel for them, it can be unnerving.

  But why did they have to keep asking him? Irritability had beset them like an outbreak of ringworm, and Quill was as riddled with it as everyone else. His nose ran incessantly, making his top lip hideously sore. And yet the noise of Calum sniffing,
or yet another person asking, What day is it, Quill? was far worse: they dripped on to his nerve-endings like scalding water. Quill breathed deeply, found himself a sharp stone and began scratching a calendar above his sleeping place. Randomly, he decided it was October.

  Domhnall Don had scratched a picture, too, of the raft he was building. How do you build a raft on a spike of rock where nothing grows bigger than lichen and limpets? You let the sea bring the makings to you. The sea delivers up all manner of things: flotsam. Splinters of disaster. You don’t have to hold the thought of them too hard or the splinter makes your heart bleed, but sometimes, far out at sea somewhere, a wave smashes into a ship, washes baskets and barrels and crates overboard, and sometimes even the mast.

  Sometimes the crew.

  All sorts of boats turn tail and run from storms towards St Kilda, meaning to beach themselves in Hirta’s Village Bay or shelter in the lee of the stacs. But some get caught in a rip tide, dashed against cliffs and broken up like oatcakes. Or they wedge on the rocks and the sea pulls them apart, plank by keel by deck by man…

  Anyway. Pieces of timber turn up all the time. A plank might have been washing around the oceans of the world for years before it comes ashore, and the next storm might carry it away again. But Kildans gather it as they gather everything else – seaweed, shellfish, birds’ eggs…

  That was how Domhnall Don came to be building a raft. He had the boys on the watch for anything down by the water’s edge, then came himself and dragged it ashore: a chunk of timber, a bit of barrel, a piece of keel, a wicker lobster pot. Things were piled now in Lower Bothy that no one could identify, knowing only that they had floated and might float again. Mr Don had Quill wriggling old nails out of timber, hoping to re-use them, to fasten everything together into a raft when the time came… He meant to cross over to Boreray. It was his way of doing something other than wait.

  One day during her visit to Hirta, Murdina Galloway said she had taught the boys quite enough for one day and it was time for them to teach her something. So they taught her how to make egg baskets out of straw – for when they climbed up to cliff ledges to gather eggs and had no hands free to carry them back down.

  “Your hands are always busy,” said Murdina. “I’ve noticed that. If you are not knotting nets, you are weaving, or plaiting horsehair, or mending ropes, or plucking birds. I like that. I mean to be busy every moment I’m alive, and not waste one second…except when I’m sleeping, of course,” she added, and laughed. And for some reason, it went through Quilliam’s head that if there was one thing he wanted to see before he died, it was Murdina Galloway’s sleeping face in the dip of a pillow filled with feathers he had gathered himself.

  They were sitting in The Street that day, mending ropes, and had their bare feet out enjoying the sunshine. Murdina looked at them and said, “God was so clever when he made you! He gave you the feet of birds and the ingenuity to outwit misfortune.”

  Quill had never heard the word before – “ingenuity” – but he could see perfectly well what it meant, and he kept it by him. In fact he pocketed lots of her words. It was like with the nails that came ashore in the bits of wooden flotsam. First he worked on them till he got them straight, then he pocketed them in case they came in handy… He could not have explained why he collected words, exactly. Nails were a lot more useful than words to the quiet-spoken people of St Kilda.

  And when it came to Domhnall Don’s raft, words would not get it built. It was going to take a lot of ingenuity, flotsam and nails for it to hold together as far as Boreray Stac, for all the place was so tantalizingly close. It was the search for flotsam that took a crowd of boys down to the waterline one day.

  At least that was what they said they had been doing, when they told the men afterwards.

  It is always dangerous to go down to the foot of the Stac. Even on the calmest days, the sea swells roll in. Every seventh wave is bigger than the others, but you don’t count the waves in case you count to nine by mistake and catch The Kilda Gloom and it fills up your head with black thoughts. So it is easy to be caught off-guard by wave number seven.

  Kenneth (who said he did not believe that the world had ended) had been teasing Euan for days, calling him “Our Little Angel” and “God’s doggie”; saying Euan “only wants to be an angel so he can wear a dress”. Teasing. Such a woolly little word for what Kenneth did once he decided to persecute another boy for the fun of it.

  Euan, gentle as a lamb, had a core of iron in him, though. However much Kenneth made fun of his “holy vision”, his belief in angels, his gathering of flowers for the cleit-altar, and his hymn singing, Euan kept doggedly on, praying for Kenneth and everybody else, too.

  Finding the Little Angel lying prostrate in front of the altar one day, arms outstretched, face pressed out of shape by the chilly rock, Kenneth stood on Euan’s back and said, “Can you walk on water? Walk on water, can you? Can you? Got enough faith and y’can walk on water. Read it in the Bible, I did.”

  That Kenneth had ever read anything was unlikely, but he was not wrong about the story. Anything concerning the sea interested the people of St Kilda, so the story of Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee was a particular favourite at the kirk. “So his good friend Peter climbs out of the boat, and starts to walk over the waves…until it suddenly goes through his head that the thing can’t be done, and his faith fails him and he starts to sink. Jesus has to reach out a hand to stop Peter drowning.” The congregation would nod, easily able to picture it. They had seen countless storm-petrels skip over the water without their feet ever sinking in.

  Now here was Kenneth, telling Euan, “You should do it. Everyone knows you’re the saint round here.” And before he had stepped off Euan’s ribcage, he had made Euan promise to try walking over the sea, to Boreray Stac.

  Kenneth picked his time, carefully. Next day, he waited until everyone else was working the cliffs, feigned a pulled muscle and said he could not work. Then he mustered an audience – just to add to Euan’s humiliation when the boy lost his nerve. It was not an audience of men, of course, or older boys, but the little ones, the little gullible ones who thought they were about to see a “miracle”: Lachlan, Niall, Davie.

  Quill and John were sharing a rope. Their rope was tied off round a spire of rock. It was John who spotted the cluster of boys down by the landing place, Kenneth looming large alongside skinny littler ones. She pointed them out to Quill, who sniffed the air. The smell of mischief reached him on the up-draught.

  But climbing up a rope, laden with birds, is a slow process, particularly when there is no rope-man at the top to pull you up.

  “What’s the drop below you?” Quill called down, and John estimated it was safer to climb down rather than up. They had to drop painfully onto a ledge below, and sidle their way down and round in the direction of the huddle of boys. They were close enough to see the grin on Kenneth’s face, but not close enough to be heard if they shouted into the wind.

  The bully was in fact declaiming, in mock, shocked tones, “Never knew you were such a mouse, Euan! Can’t believe you’re such a worm, such a girl, such a Doubting Thomas. Such an unbeliever.” The other boys were tittering, but uneasy, too, and disappointed. A miracle would have been exciting.

  Unaware of the dare, Quilliam climbed cautiously down towards the cove. The cliff was steep, and it would be foolish to risk a fall by hurrying. So he was still high up, and got a good aerial view of the moment Euan gave in to Kenneth’s bullying.

  Euan simply walked across the shelf of rock creamy with foam, and kept on walking, out on to open water.

  The sea ate him up.

  Kenneth’s jaw dropped. He stretched out a hand as if to grab the moment back out of mid-air. He made another futile grab with the other hand as Lachlan came pelting past and threw himself into the sea.

  “Never thought he’d do it!” Kenneth was yelping for the seventh time as John and Quill came sliding down the rock face. “I never thought…!”

  The sev
enth wave rose up, huge, and they all saw Euan hanging, outstretched, in its transparency. Then he was gone again, and the cold of the big wave broke over their thighs and sent the little ones reeling. It was devastating, that cold. The muscles of their legs went rigid, also their brains. They simply stared at the hollow dip behind the wave: a shining bowl holding nothing, nothing.

  Then Lachlan surfaced, alone. He looked to right and left, saw nothing, upended himself and disappeared again, his kicking feet leaving a flummery of foam on the surface. When he came up next, he had Euan by the scruff of his jacket.

  Lachlan trod water, looking landwards, just like the seals off the village beach. He made no effort to swim towards them. Euan blinked and began to struggle, but Lachlan only held him by the face and told him sharply, “Be still.” He was counting the waves. When, looking over his shoulder, he saw a large swell rise up like the back of a whale, he let it carry him and Euan hurtling towards the Stac. Any cross-current and the wave would smack them both dead against the rock face.

  But the shelf caught them like a shovel, and the wave slid out from under them and left a wet starfish of arms and legs jerking with cold.

  Euan was at last brought to tears – not by Kenneth, not by fright or cold, even. But by his failure to walk on water.

  Kenneth was appalled. “What was he thinking? Idiot! Ninny! Numbskull! Got cheese for brains, or what?” He had never imagined for a moment that the Little Angel would take up the dare – would believe for one moment that it could be done – would dare to be so stupid. “Just teasing, I was! Just joking!”

  Just trying to make the child cry and grovel.

  And then Lachlan had gone in too! Poor Kenneth: bewilderment sat on him like a wet sheep and squeezed all the breath out of him.

  As for Lachlan, if boys had tails, his would have been wagging. He was a hero. Quilliam would have given him a gold sovereign (if he had ever had one). With the exception of Kenneth, they could none of them wait to get back to the Bothy and tell what Lachlan had done.